U.S. Embassy in Iraq Largest, Most Expensive Ever
Have you ever Seen the 1 Billion dollar US Embassy in Iraq?
I don’t know how I missed this morsel, but I heard someone mention the size of the US embassy in Iraq today, and immediately went to the net to do a search for more details. What I found boggled my mind. In today’s day of rampant spending, and entitlement programs run wild, it takes quite a bit to shock me. Well I was shocked, and pissed off to find that the US embassy in Iraq is the absolute epitome of spending money on something that is not needed.
Here are the details and some photographs of the embassy. And by the way, President Barack Obama has nothing to do with this, as this one rests solely on the shoulders of President George Bush.
The Stats on the US Embassy
The 104-acre compound, bigger than the Vatican and about the size of 80 football fields, boasts 21 buildings, a commissary, cinema, retail and shopping areas, restaurants, schools, a fire station, power and water treatment plants, as well as telecommunications and wastewater treatment facilities.
The compound is six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York, and two-thirds the size of the National Mall in Washington.
It has space for 1,000 employees with six apartment blocks and is 10 times larger than any other U.S. embassy.
“The presence of a massive U.S. embassy— by far the largest in the world — co-located in the Green Zone with the Iraqi government is seen by Iraqis as an indication of who actually exercises power in their country,” the International Crisis Group, a European-based research group, said in 2006.
“The idea of an embassy this huge, this costly, and this isolated from events taking place outside its walls is not necessarily a cause for celebration,” architectural historian Jane Loeffler wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007.
“Traditionally, at least, embassies were designed to further interaction with the community in which they were built,” she wrote. “Although the U.S. Government regularly proclaims confidence in Iraq’s democratic future, the U.S. has designed an embassy that conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for their future. Instead, the U.S. has built a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence in the face of continued violence.”
